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List of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover models enumerates the chronological history of cover models for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has grown from being an issue of Sports Illustrated magazine created just to creatively fill space at a time of year with little sports news into a major marketing franchise that includes a special separate issue, a website, television specials, calendars, books and enormous amounts of advertising. It began as a short photo spread of women in bathing suits and has become a fashion issue for beachwear worn by the world's top models. Being the subject of the Sports Illustrated magazine cover is a well chronicled event which has both become a measure by which fame is measured and a status which is supposedly accompanied by a curse known as the "SI jinx". There seems to have been no reports of any association of the SI jinx with the swimsuit issue.
The media considers being the cover person for Sports Illustrated an important career statistic for notable persons and keeps track of cover appearance counts with Michael Jordan having taken over the leadership from Muhammad Ali. In the internet era, Time Warner had to create a dedicated web page for Sport Illustrated cover research.
There is a lot of public interest in who is on the cover of fashion magazines with websites dedicated to the subject. For supermodels being on the cover of important magazines is a matter of prestige and achieving the cover of Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit edition is quite a celebrated highlight. It is especially noteworthy if a cover model is fortunate enough to have a solo cover appearance. The unveiling of the swimsuit issue cover and its model is a media event, widely reported in the press.
For many the mere sight of bronzed bathing beauties on the cover of a sports magazine is quite a moral issue. The issue generates numerous letters from readers both in support and in opposition of the issue each year. Numerous subscribers cancel subscriptions as a matter of propriety annually. Recently, Time Warner took action to avoid many of the complainants by withholding the Swimsuit issue from certain types of recipients, such as libraries and schools.
Numerous types of trivia and statistics are monitored regarding the swimsuit issue cover subjects. Several have gone on to subsequent success in Hollywood. Others have become the spouses of notable celebrities. The following list is a list of models chosen as subjects for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover, incorporating some related statistics and trivia.